Running

Stat

Punctuation is important.

In this day and age, when most daily messages are transferred via some kind of type written means–email, text message, facebook status, tweets–and you cannot hear the cadences of the invisible punctuations, it is important to punctuate your messages even in the most casual forms of communication.

Text messages, in particular, are supposed to be informal, succinct, and composed in a relatively quick manner. It is not expected that we spell out everything, capitalize proper nouns, or punctuate. Or so I thought…

Tonight I invited my friend who is new in town, and therefore new to the local culture, out to eat Japanese ramen. Here in Hawaii, everything is casual, but of course he doesn’t know that yet.

So through phone text messaging he asks (read bottom message first):

And in my usual text messaging habit of not punctuating, I answer (read top message):